Interpolation based transmit beamforming for MIMO-OFDM with limited feedback

Transmit beamforming and receive combining are simple methods for exploiting spatial diversity in multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system. Optimal beamforming requires channel state information in the form of the beamforming vectors for each OFDM subcarrier. This paper proposes a limited feedback architecture that combines beamforming vector quantization and smart vector interpolation. In the proposed system, the receiver sends a fraction of information about the optimal beamforming vectors to the transmitter and the transmitter computes the beamforming vectors for all subcarriers through interpolation. A new spherical interpolator is developed that exploits parameters for phase rotation to satisfy the phase invariance and unit norm properties of the transmitted beamforming vectors. The beamforming vectors and phase parameters are quantized at the receiver and the quantized information is provided to the transmitter. The proposed quantization system provides only a moderate increase in complexity versus over comparable approaches. Numerical simulations show that the proposed scheme performs better than existing diversity techniques with the same feedback data rate.